Page:Letters of Mlle. de Lespinasse.djvu/156

1774] find nothing in you which gives you the right to reclaim what you have lost. Well, mon ami, I am sufficiently calm to be just ; I approve of your conduct, though it grieves me ; I esteem you for allowing nothing to take the place of truth. And, in fact, of what could you complain ? I have relieved you ; it is dreadful to be the object of a feeling we do not share; we suffer, and we make the other suffer : to love and to be loved is the happiness of heaven ; when one has known it and lost it, what remains but to die ?

There are two things in this life that do not admit of mediocrity — poesy and. . . But I do not deceive myself ; the feeling that I had for you was not perfect. First, it caused me to blame myself, — it cost me remorse ; and then — I know not if it was the trouble in my conscience that over- threw my soul and changed, absolutely, my manner of being and of loving — I was ceaselessly agitated by feelings I condemned; I felt jealousy, disquietude, dis- trust ; I blamed you incessantly ; I imposed a law upon myself to make no complaint; but that coercion was dreadful to me; in short, that way of loving was so foreign to my soul that it became a torture. Mon ami, I loved you too much, and not enough. Thus we have both gained by the change that has been wrought in me, and which was neither your work nor mine. I saw clear for a moment, and in less than half an hour I felt the end of pain, I became extinct, and then I resuscitated. What is inconceivable is that on coming to myself, I found only M. de Mora ... the faintness that came upon my brain had obliterated the traces of all else. You, mon ami, who, fifteen minutes earlier filled all my thoughts, never once re-entered my mind for twenty-four hours ; and then I saw that my sentiment was only a memory.

I remained thus several days without recovering the